As frail as white flowers
by ovagabondgirl
Summary: The women loved their men, but the men went to war. A story following the lives of the Easy men during and after the war. Chuck Grant/OFC, David Webster/OFC, Joe Liebgot/OFC. No Slash.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: I own nothing. This story is based on the characters of the Band of Brother series and not on the real men portrayed. I apologize for any offence.

Characters: Chuck Grant/OFC, David Webster/OFC, Joe Liebgott/OFC

Rating: M

Author note: Please read and review. I don't really know if I should finish this, but if you like it, let me know and I'll give it try. The story concept has slightly changed since the first draft...

**CHAPTER 1**

When her world exploded, he was already miles away.

He could not sleep that night; he lied underneath the sparse covering with his eyes closed. He could just hear the terror of it in the distance: The Germans were bombing Eindhoven.

When her world exploded, she had been walking walking from the kitchen, through the hallway to her room – small and cosy 10 by 7 feet – with a cup of tea in hand.

The roof caved in, bringing all four outer walls with it and she was trapped between a wall and the blackest of black darkness.

Chaos.

O, what chaos.

A white flower fluttered to the ground.

People call it the country of dreams.

She sighed.

Europe was one awful grey mess: the stench of it still in her nose, the fine dust of collapsed buildings still on her skin. She had no home there.

She had no home here either. She sighed, once more.

Propaganda. That is all it basically was.

But when she was there on the blue water of the Atlantic it seemed like such a perfect plan. Europe was already far behind her. And since people called it the country of dreams...

It wasn't, but it was better than Eindhoven where she had lost everything. Where she had lost even despite the chaos of exploding bricks and raining fire, her heart to a man in a few brief seconds.

So was war – it waited for nothing and no one.

And when it was over…

...

O, what a golden boy: He was perfectly lovely. With a perfect tan, perfect gleaming white teeth, perfect hair. The perfect son. The perfect _soldier_. The American Dream.

And he was a paratrooper none the less.

...

She is standing by a newspaper stand, glancing over headlines and she looks up catching the glint of copper in a man's hair.

It would be impossible.

A week later she is standing at the same newspaper stand. Then she sees him; four years after that day that the American troops marched into Eindhoven. She recognizes him coming out of the general shop across the road, with groceries dangerously unbalanced in his arms. Not dressed in a uniform. How strange to see American soldiers – men - in everyday trousers and shirts.

She wants to reach out.

To touch him briefly; just as briefly as that day in the street in Eindhoven.

But it would be humiliating having him look up and not recognize her. How could he?

...

Young women were skipping and dancing from soldier to soldier and she got lost in the crowd of orange flags and khaki shirts. Young women with smiles as bright and wide as a clear sky, bashful and unashamedly planting kisses from one soldier's cheek to another. She got lost in the crowd, got pushed towards the edge of the street where all she could do was stare.

Young women, all pretty and all blonde. She hated herself for shrinking into a corner.

She considered herself rather ordinary: Neither pretty nor blonde, with a mouth too small for her face and eyes too big, too grey.

Young women, all of them eager. She hated herself for not throwing herself into the arms of the nearest soldier. An old ache was suddenly there. O, how the Americans must love Eindhoven, she thought to herself cynically, with so many eager young women in the street.

It was impossible for her though to share the joy – she was more sensible than to think that it was all over. How could it ever be really over?

But at heart she had always been conflicted - cynical and hopeful and romantic all at the same time.

Eindhoven however made her foremost a cynic.

It felt to her that it would never be over.

That she would never be able to forget what happened to her.

...

She frowns. She had never been one to believe in fate, but maybe a chance meeting between two strangers was all it took to change a life. The frown turns into a smile. She still has a white flower, hidden between two pages of a book.

...

A white flower behind her ear was sent fluttering to the ground, as small and delicate as a single snowflake.

It was something she did each morning: pick three white flowers, one for behind her ear, one for a delicate vase next to her bedside table and one for a grave.

She hung onto this small ritual, because somehow it brought her a little peace each day.

Maybe he had not noticed knocking her into the wall?

It took him an entire minute to realize that she was there; crushed between the wall and himself, because he had his back to her and her eighteen year old neighbour was yanking at his arm. How could he have noticed her with Elsa on his arm: pretty as a picture?

She hated the sudden self-pity that choked in her chest.

She had put her hand on his shoulder then. "Sir, could you maybe move just a fraction?" Her English was faultless, but an almost pathetic whisper in a crowd of voices.

He turned towards her.

And apologized, with a clear and calm voice and an infectious grin; she found herself momentarily holding her breath.

Clear.

Calm.

Calculating.

"Sorry, Miss," he said, "And may I add that your English is a welcome change from this young girl's gibberish. I can't make out a word of what she's saying." He looked over his shoulder, but Elsa had moved away. Was already lost to the crowd.

She started to smile.

His grin was infectious beyond reasonable explanation.

She could not help but think that moments ago she was alone and lost at the edge of a busy street in the Netherlands and someone – not just anyone – a hero of sorts had found her.

She found it all utterly silly and romantic. This had to be the beginning of the end?

"Well do you see she's already gone? Goodness, you girls show a lot of enthusiasm. I've never been kissed so many times in my life." He looked at her then – waiting...? No, obviously not. Utterly silly…

"Miss, I would just love to kiss you right now." A whisper in a busy street.

He pulled her closer then and kissed her and it was the most romantic moment of her sad existence.

...

She frowns again. She had been a brief distraction for a soldier in a street, in a town, in a country crippled by war.

How could he remember her?

He is walking down the street now, the left side of his body slightly slumped. She knows that he is different. Even more than any of the other men that has returned.

The sure and easy walk is gone.

Very much gone.

Slumped over slightly to one side. Undoubtedly injured during the course of the war after Eindhoven.

She feels compelled to run after him. She does, not really thinking it through. Of course she shouldn't.

When she reaches him and puts her hand on his shoulder she realizes that she was so very wrong about Eindhoven being the beginning of the end. She should have known not to be so naïve as to think it.

Touching his shoulder is the beginning of the end.

How silly of her to think it, but it must be.

He is the beginning of the end.

Because he had had his hands all over her. In Eindhoven. Where he had saved her in mere moments from being alone on the side of a street.

He is her end.

He smiles when he sees her, but the look in his eyes scares her. It turns her entire body into a lump of stone and she has to keep herself from crumbling to the ground.

It is almost as if she's back in the burning Eindhoven and the world is burning to the ground.

He does not know her.

But apart from that, he does not even seem to know himself. His mouth is turned at the corners as if he's in pain, his eyes deathly dark under a frowning brow. His entire face is a grimace.

She knows instinctively that he is only a shadow.

Only a memory.

The man from Eindhoven is dead.

"Chuck Grant…?" She had only whispered his name that once in Eindhoven, but doing it now makes her sad that she knows it. She wants to turn around and walk away.

He had been shot through the head; the scar is a deep groove on the side of his head.

"Do I know you, Miss?" Mumbled, slurry words; and her hurt is already leaking from her eyes and dotting the pavement: she had loved his clear and calm voice.

_O, Chuck._

_You are my beginning and my end and now look at you._

She already hates herself for it, but she turns away and walks away.

There is nothing else to do.

He had had his hands all over her. In Eindhoven. But all she has left of it now is a single photo in a drawer.

In Eindhoven he had kissed her until all she could do was stand there breathlessly and gone were the dull grey in her eyes: they had become alive like an ocean full of silver fish.

A group of soldiers standing near them was taking a picture and Grant had pulled her with him, kissing her again and when the flash went off she had thought that her life had somehow changed.

"My name is Grant. Remember it. I'll be back."

Afterwards she found the white flower in the street and kept it with the newspaper article that had the photo in it.

_Chuck Grant… You are my beginning and my end and now look at you._


	2. Chapter 2

**CHAPTER 2**

September 1949

United States of America

The girl finds herself writing about David Webster. The man with the carefully chosen sentences.

xxx

_I have been dead all my life before I met him. I have been a limp and soft body, not seeing, not really feeling. I have been living between walls taller and thicker and harder than mountains. Escape is slow, too slow._

_I have only seen his face once or twice. In a crowd of eager students answering a question, reading a verse. O, but his face…_

She found herself in David Webster's dorm room.

She is neatly dressed of course, as a lady of good graces should be. But she finds herself sitting on David Webster's bed. The neat - o very neat - turquoise skirt getting awfully rumpled.

His eyes is on her.

The intense gaze gets her every time. It is the first thing that you notice.

Blue as the sea.

As the sky.

As gems held in the palm of your hands.

_O, David, what blue dazzling eyes you have. I've fallen in love with them from that very first moment. I've fallen in love with your hurt and regret and the fierce anger._

_Your stories break my heart, David._ She does not tell him that; instead she adjusts her skirt and clears her throat, "It needs some work. And this character – Jonathan, is it? I don't like him." She's a terrible liar.

Because if she wants to admit it or not he's a brilliant writer. And she's jealous.

He's standing up from his chair, throwing his pen down on the table and taking a long deep drag of his cigarette. For some reason – she can't explain it – she loves the smell of his cigarettes.

"I didn't really invite you over to discuss character development. And Joseph is fine. That's the way he's suppose to be."

"I thought his name was Jonathan." She is intrigued by his characters, by the way that he brings them to live. She can almost see them standing in front of her.

David turns his back on her. "Jonathan, Joseph, what's the difference?" There _is_ a difference, but since he is obviously shrugging it away like it does not matter she does not bring it up again.

"Well, you asked my opinion…that's why I'm here?"

_O, David, if I should be quite honest with you, I'm here because you've got the clearest blue eyes in the world and I'm utterly obsessed with you._ _And I already feel naked and white as a freshly washed sheet blowing in the wind, lifted from the line with a sharp pull, soaring away on the wind._

He is taking another drag of the cigarette, shrugging and then turning around, a wicked grin on his face. "O, really?"

She blushes and says the first thing that comes up in her mind, "Your room smells lovely in the heat of summer." He raises his eyebrow and the blush deepens.

"And why is that?" _Wicked, wicked grin._

"It smells like leather and khaki and starch and Old Spice… of soap… and notebooks and paper and pen." _Of man… of writing… the room smells of writing and the writer hard at work behind his desk._ _Most of all though - _and this she dare not ever mention to him - _I can almost smell, very faintly, blood and smoke and fire still lingering in everything he owns._

"Fuck, what a mouthful." She can't answer him – his swearing always makes her wince. She is a lady of good graces. "You mean it smells of man…?"

She looks away, catching again a glimpse of a chest in a corner of the room.

_Is that where you hide your secrets, David Webster?_

"Don't tell me. You want to hear war stories. For your writing? Am I a character, Louisa?"

"No. Of course not." She feels extremely silly. _Because I'm lying and he knows it_. She expects him to be angry, but he looks rather disappointed. Frowning makes him look mean and tough. Unsafe. Untouchable. But also vulnerable. _Now at that he'll just laugh. Or worse. A part of me doesn't want to think of him holding a gun._

The frown disappears, is replaced for a millisecond by flashing anger and then he just seems frustrated, pulling his hands through his hair.

"I've got to go." My skirt falls back neatly as I get up.

Gently, but very firmly he pushes me back.

_Pulse racing, cheeks flaming up, heart in my throat. O, David, what firm hands you have…_

He's on the bed next to her now, with his hand at the nape of her neck, playing with the crisp and taut material of her shirt's collar.

"Do you want to know how many German's I've killed?" He whispers the words at her jaw, with his mouth lightly brushing her skin.

_He must be able to see the throbbing vein in my neck letting blood stream through my body. Little veins fill up like rivers being overrun by winter rains, bulging and breaking the confinements of soft, soil banks._

He takes the hand in her lap and puts it on the top most button of his shirt. It slips open easily before she can even stop herself, but her fingers are suddenly clumsy, stupid, sweaty, making the second button more difficult. With one swift moment he pulls the shirt over his head, sending it flying into a corner.

_Typically._

And the whole time he is holding her with that icy gaze.

Her hand is pulled to his chest and she knows that she is not in the least bit interested in resisting.

_Mere infatuation. That's all._

She is telling herself that she does not care about his stupid short stories that touch those deeply hidden parts of her. Hidden like a chest full of precious secrets at the bottom of a linen closet or beneath a dusty set of stairs, that a boy can only open after something has broken in himself and he has become a man.

_O, David, with the white as death skin and the hair on his chest and the hard stomach. _

He is serious. Almost too serious. He is always locked in this room.

_I guess I don't really want to know how many German's he has killed, no._ So she does not answer him. She cannot think with her hand on his feverishly warm chest rising and falling evenly beneath her fingers. For him to be so warm is the last thing she expected.

"Quiet now, are we?" _Devilish grin._ What is she suppose to say? "At least now I know how to shut you up."

She jerks her hand away from his chest; _I need to get out of here_. "I'm not doing this."

"Doing what?" She wants to slap the smile off his face.

"Whatever this is?"

"I'm not doing anything you don't want me to…" His hand is lightly turning her face in his direction, and his mouth is back at her neck… at her jaw…at the corner of her mouth. Just a soft whisper. Her mouth is already open when he kisses her.

_I thought I was alive, but until this moment I must have been the walking dead._

_WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE WHILE I'VE_

_BEEN THE WALKING DEAD._

And she knows he's thinking it too, because whereas the kiss is soft and gentle and tentative at first, his mouth quickly turns into a fierce storm raging and breaking itself on her, with his tongue a sweeping wave, a swelling tide.

And she is a bruised and broken shore before he has even really started. With hands at his shoulders and chest and arms, clinging on for dear life. _Because I'm afraid to let go, I'm afraid of all life leaving me, of turning back into the dead girl I was before this moment._

He pushes her back onto the bed rather roughly. Stockings rip as his hands take hold of her thighs; the skirt is pushed up her legs. _I'm breathing, not breathing._

_Breathing, not breathing._

_Breathing…_

_Not…_

_Breathing._

And then he pulls away for two seconds. And her heart stops beating at his words. "Let me…," with that intense gaze, "Let me make love to you."

xxx

Afterwards she trashes the scraps of paper in the bin.

There is no point in obsessing about broken men.


	3. Chapter 3

**CHAPTER 3**

April 1945

Germany

Steam rised from the bath.

Up.

Little drops formed on the tiles.

Little blue veins running up an arm.

He had to wash it all away from him. 

xxx 

September 1949

United States of America

_O, Joe, why do we do this?_

_He finds me in the kitchen, hand hovering with a butter knife over a slice of bread._

_He always finds me._

_He is furious. Veins throbbing in his neck. Teeth snarls._

_What a wolfish devil-like grin?_

_Throbbing. Throbbing._

_And I am backed. Backed._

_Into a corner._

_I have my back backed into a corner._

_We hide out in corners. We are one and the same._

_He is furious: he hates me._

_He scares me._

_One day I'll be free of him. (I'm obsessed with him.) He's no hero – he killed a man when the war was already over. In a moment of madness._

_And we fuck in the kitchen._

_Slamming. Pounding._

_Thrusting._

_Slamming. Pounding._

_Thrusting._

_Thrusting._

_Again. Again._

_Again._

_O, Joe, why do you use me like this?_

xxx 

April 1945

Germany 

There was a man in her bathroom. One of them… an American.

She was furious.

But scared to death. With one foot in the doorway, one in the hall, hands trembling she stood there, all the time praying. Praying, praying, a mumble of words that made no real sense.

Scared to death.

Of the man in the bathtub with the peaceful-looking face.

O, how harmless and serene he looks.

O, look at the curve of his mouth. Look at the way his hand hangs over the rim. Look at the tilt of his head as he rests it.

Is he an officer? Captain? Lieutenant?

She looked around for any signs, trying terrible not to let the shotgun drop to the floor with a loud thud. There was a pile of clothes on the chair, but she could not identify any rank marks on it.

Ficken. Scheiß drauf.

She wanted him out of her house.

The... seconds... ticked... by.

O, look at the fine lines of his torso, running down... the sinewy muscles, slightly visible bulging veins on his arms.

The line of hair leading…

Leading her eyes where they should not go. Soap still lingered here and there on his body.

O, Father, help me. A prayer, and then:

She loaded.

Immediately alarm flashed over his face, eyes darted open. Water splashed in a flood over the rim, as he reached for his weapon.

Water splashing almost to her feet.

"Don't."

He frowned; let his hand slip back into the bath.

With the gun she motioned for him to get up, but he did not react. Instead he laid there in the tub frowning, almost grinning like an idiot.

"Get up." It was hard to keep her voice from trembling.

"My clothes." Grinning. Grinning like an idiot. What a wolfish devil-like grin?

Finally he moved and there was another flood of water, spilling all the way to her feet. The water ran down his body: bony, skinny, lean.

Ruthless. Dangerous.

He was frighteningly close, with little more than a meter between them. She kept her eyes focused intently on his face. "Fine. You can get your clothes. But don't even move in the direction of that gun."

And then, as he climbed from the bath he started laughing.

Ruthless. Dangerous. Arrogant. Taking his sweet fucking time.

"Shut up."

He turned around halfway to look at her, just when, to her great embarrassment, her eyes were on his body: bony, skinny, lean.

He started talking again, first lazily pulling the shorts up to cover himself, and then reaching for a towel. "I'll tell you this. You've got composure." He winked.

Arrogant, o so fucking arrogant and he's purposely trying to distract me. She followed a drop of water with her eyes as it ran down his chest.

"You just think of having your way with me and I'll blast you out of this room." What a silly thing to say, she thought the moment the words were out of her mouth, especially when he gave her another wolfish grin.

The steam kept on rising.

Up.

Little drops formed on the tiles.

The grin turned into a sneer. Anger flashed over his face. Frightening, frightening anger.

"Don't worry about it, Fraulein. I don't fuck German whores."

Tears stung behind her eyelids. She had never in her life been called a whore. 

xxx 

September 1949

United States of America 

Even now she remains his German whore.

And men do not love their whores.

When he is done with her, she lies on the floor: a quivering mess. He rolls away from her.

"Joe?"

"Don't." He is angry, as he always is afterwards. He hates her, she knows it. He hates her. But he needs her.


End file.
